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Topping B100 Amplifier Review

Rate this amplifier:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 28 6.7%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 24 5.8%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 79 19.0%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 284 68.4%

  • Total voters
    415
we do know that discrete amplifiers are not intrinsically more reliable than chip-based amps.

We know do we? I didn't get that memo. :)

Amplifiers deliver high voltages and high currents on a constant basis into very low impedances. That's what they are supposed to be designed to do. Well designed amplifiers can do that, but IC (chip-amps) based amplifiers need a whole lot of housekeeping to keep them from not blowing up when the going gets tough. They are always a compromise, because their entire existence is driven by minimizing costs.

Discrete amplifiers can parallel up output devices, beef up the power supplies and improve the heat sink efficacy. They can be scaled easily, a basic design can serve multiple price points and performance demands, all while being extremely reliable and low cost, especially when it comes to repair.

A chip-based amplifier (we are talking here OPTs on the substrate, not a 'driver' chip for conventional OPTs) is a take-it or leave-it design, mostly.

Take the biggest and most widely used "chip" based HiFi amplifier devices I can think of. Historic, for perspective in this discussion. Sanyo's thick film hybrids (STKs) from the 1970s through the 1990s. They had many hundreds of STK SKUs. Ranging from single darlington output packs to an entire 150W+ stereo amplifier in a SIL package. Millions and millions sold to OEMs over 3 decades. Pretty much every brand used them at some point. Be it class A driver stages for a real output stage or basically an entire power amp in plastic package.

STK based amplification was sold on cost, ease of assembly and guaranteed performance (it was average at best). Not SOTA, but good enough for Joe Average. They also are renowned for blowing up in the face of difficult loads. You cannot short an STK and expect it to survive. They overheat easily and fail, especially when installed on heatsinks that are too small. They can oscillate and destroy themselves. They sound fine when they are working, but Sanyo discontinued the entire STK thick film range in December 1995 and left everyone out in the cold. Now there are only fakes and very old NOS or Chinese SMD copies that don't work. People have resorted to building discrete equivalents to keep their gear alive. Same thing happened in the 70s/80s when Sanken killed their "amp on a chip" hybrids. People had to reverse engineer the IC or throw their amplifier on the trash. We know most went to landfill...

Here's a nice little complimentary pair of Toshiba outputs I scavenged from a 1980s amplifier I found on the side of the road. About AU$7 per piece to buy today. Yes, you can still buy them!

IMG_4245.jpg


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High voltage : check! 180V Vce
High current : check! 12A Ic max
High dissipation : check! 130W each.
Junction temp max: 125 degrees max
High fT? : 30MHz.

You blow up you amp, you can fix it if it's discrete. In the 1980s, 90s, 2000s and today in 2024. Big difference.

Long post, I know, but amplifiers, particularly power amplifiers, need devices and design that can withstand abuse and real world demands. That's why they are called "power" amplifiers.
 
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We know do we? I didn't get that memo. :)
You didn't get the context either.:cool:

And thanks for conflating serviceability and reliability in your manifesto!
Poorly designed discrete products have extreme unreliability.

Agree on the ruggedness part though. But that doesn't appear to be the issue here.
 
I put my Christmas gift, The Topping B100 Monos yesterday into my HiFi chain.

It was subjective an overwhelming experience for me.

Here is a little bit of the subjective Bla Bla Bla, which I wrote to my friends Peter, Gregor and Helge, with whom I do some listening sessions from time to time:

„Now I have humbly read all about Bob Dylan from your Rolling Stones 2012 article https://www.rollingstone.de/bob-dylan-abschied-von-gestern-das-vollstaendige-interview-355303/ (many, many, many thanks!) and find everything comparatively unimportant, which I was lucky enough to experience tonight. After all, it was supposed to be all about music - and why shouldn't it be allowed to come from a transistor radio?

Nevertheless:
My XLR cables arrived yesterday. Today at 10 p.m. I was finally able to put the Topping B100 power amplifiers into operation. Funnily enough, they were connected via RCA cables...... The B100 mono blocks operate in Class B and have the world's best measured values for noise, harmonic distortion and also for the important intermodulation distortion (which simulates complex music signals).

The sound:

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

It makes a difference if the distortion is 3,000 times lower than with your AMR 777s.

Blackness. Total blackness. Power! Fear! Shock! Everything deep, pure, clear! Frightening in the coarse dynamics that I flinched at the drums during KUMMER by Trio, although played minimally quieter than today at noon via the Fosi. I thought something had fallen over in the room. The blow came out of nowhere.
Then the “separation” between the instruments on the one hand and the “aura” around the instruments on the other. I would never have thought that Golden Brown by the Stranglers could sound so audiophile (and the drums so fucking REALISTIC).

As always with new stuff, Suzanne Vega was the first with TOMS DINNER on the SOLTITUDE STANDING
So pure, so unbelievably pure.

How could I have listened to the Sonos Play One for years?
How could I have only listened to the Fosi V3 amplifier for a year?

So this is what it sounds like when a power amplifier simply disappears and becomes invisible in the signal path.

So even non-audiophile records are actually that good (or at least that pornographically detailed)!

That's how beautifully the Timmermanns developed my WaveMon 182/22 speakers.

Ray Brown's double bass suddenly sings at the bottom: structure, melody, which before was just droning. And on the Oscar Petterson I even discovered a piano note floating in the eternal 96 kHz reverberation of the sides, which even escaped me with you!
Things fade out without the new sound having completely displaced the old one. The old quieter tone sounds even further without being masked away..... Isn't that what Hiraga said about good tubes?

Ella and Louis, also with 96 kHz -goil!!!

I think I would have missed out on all this if I had bought the Neumann speakers with their built-in primitive digital amplifiers limited to 24 kHz....

I'm afraid that next Black Friday Gregor and you will each be EUR 480,- poorer.....

There is no alternative to the B100, at least for speakers with more than 90 dB efficiency.“
 
Without knowing the (protection) circuit/algorithm, adequate SOA protection will probably not be guaranteed.
With low speaker EPDR values, however, the load on the output transistors can exceed the permissible SOA limits even with moderate (real) average power. The amplifier may die before it even gets really warm.
My Pair of B100 is now just working for two days. Everything super fine so far. Speakers have 4 Ohms with a Minimum of 3.6 Ohms. But I am not a loud hearer.
I will tell you guys if Problems occure. I just hear Music with medium gain. Hope it will not be a new Topping PA 5 case. I will do a Poll.
 
Here is a little bit of the subjective Bla Bla Bla, which I wrote to my friends Peter, Gregor and Helge, with whom I do some listening sessions from time to time:
Tell me it was a parody of all the usual subjectivist voodoo...
 
Ha ha ha! Not at all! Invite me to a blind test! ;)
Happy to, but it would have to be in Amsterdam.

It's just that your posting is something I am more used to seeing on the usual subjectivist faithful forums, not on a forum with "science" in the name.
 
I'm pretty sure almost everybody will hear a difference between a lowly TPA3255-based amp (notably one without PFFB) and the B100, in a DBT.
Not a fair comparison by price.

What about A/B comparing a Hypex NC252MP-based or two NC250-based monoblocs against a pair of B100s?

-Ed
 
Happy to, but it would have to be in Amsterdam.

It's just that your posting is something I am more used to seeing on the usual subjectivist faithful forums, not on a forum with "science" in the name.
It makes it better if he won't admit to pulling our legs. Or maybe he found some really great mind altering stuff.
 
I'm pretty sure almost everybody will hear a difference between a lowly TPA3255-based amp (notably one without PFFB) and the B100, in a DBT.
Well, there is user scope on old-fidelity-forum.de who has been maintaining for years that there is no way to distinguish a marginally competent amp from a good one. He's been challenging people to come for blind listening tests.

This is one of the more recent threads:

The old Universum is very marginally competent. The Burmester is signficantly better but still worse than the 3e or Topping amps with PFFB - actually, I am surprised at how bad it is considering the amout of thinking and hardware that went into it.

I read a couple of such threads a few years ago, have not followed recently, but AFIR, the result was always that people cannot tell the amps apart.
 
Well, there is user scope on old-fidelity-forum.de who has been maintaining for years that there is no way to distinguish a marginally competent amp from a good one. He's been challenging people to come for blind listening tests.

This is one of the more recent threads:

The old Universum is very marginally competent. The Burmester is signficantly better but still worse than the 3e or Topping amps with PFFB - actually, I am surprised at how bad it is considering the amout of thinking and hardware that went into it.

I read a couple of such threads a few years ago, have not followed recently, but AFIR, the result was always that people cannot tell the amps apart.
But as usual there was the predictable "but your loudspeakers were not good enough to show the differences in the amps" comments...
 
I read some more of that thread just now, and out of the three listeners, one could not discern, one got 7/10 the other 9/10. The trick in this case was that the Universum had a low damping factor of 30 and a somewhat insufficient lower corner frequency, so bass parts were what gave it away.

The Canton tower speakers were probably less than ideal to reveal distortion, as are many big name speakers. If you have a speaker that distorts in the midrange to the tune of 0.5 - 1% at 90 dB/1 m, you maybe have 80 dB at the listener position. It will be nearly impossible to detect even - 70 dB amplifier distortion swamped by -30 db loudspeaker distortion unless the amp produces substantial higher order distortion.

It would be great to use something like KEF R Meta as a test loudspeaker due to its relatively low distortion.
 
I read some more of that thread just now, and out of the three listeners, one could not discern, one got 7/10 the other 9/10. The trick in this case was that the Universum had a low damping factor of 30 and a somewhat insufficient lower corner frequency, so bass parts were what gave it away.
Right, the Universum was almost a pathological case.
The Canton tower speakers were probably less than ideal to reveal distortion, as are many big name speakers. If you have a speaker that distorts in the midrange to the tune of 0.5 - 1% at 90 dB/1 m, you maybe have 80 dB at the listener position. It will be nearly impossible to detect even - 70 dB amplifier distortion swamped by -30 db loudspeaker distortion unless the amp produces substantial higher order distortion.
I don't think you can find any speaker that wouldn't have at least an order of magnitude more distortion than non-pathological amplifiers.
 
Happy to, but it would have to be in Amsterdam.

It's just that your posting is something I am more used to seeing on the usual subjectivist faithful forums, not on a forum with "science" in the name.
Yes, there is a thread here in the forum in which someone asked the members 10 or 15 questions to find out, if someone is a subjectivist or an objectivist.

My Test results have shown, that I am 90% Objectivist. But there are these damned 10% in me….. ;)

Perhaps it was just he lack of PFFB in my Fosi V3 (Stereo) which results in a significantly more realistic frequency response of the B100 Monos which made the largest differences….

Normally I highly admire the sentence, spoken out by @amirm in one of his YouTube videos, in which he stated, that the slogan „I just only trust my own ears / what sounds better in my ears IS better“ is just nonsens: you can’t even trust your own ears. The exact same file, one day before an other file, one day after an other file played, can sound totally different. So don’t trust anybody, even don’t trust yourself!!!
 
Right, the Universum was almost a pathological case.

I don't think you can find any speaker that wouldn't have at least an order of magnitude more distortion than non-pathological amplifiers.
We can at least try to find a speaker that does not add too much nonlinear distortion at least in the all-critical midrange. Apart from KEF, some of the higher end B&W come to mind and diy approaches with Bliesma and Purifi.

Current drive would also help, but then you'd needto modify the amplifier you want to test...

I don't think there will ever be a chance to discern amplifier harmonic distortion unless it is high order, but I would not be surprised if some IMD was audible. That, by the way, is another argument for active analog or digital XOs.
 
I noticed in the Topping shop (https://shenzhenaudio.com/products/...5d8r89rrFmVoY_16pgkENLterw29LG4FPSLqmMV0pY6yE), there is a comment that says:
At power levels higher than 5W @ 4 ohms, its safety protection will gently shut down the amplifier if the input signal contains higher level tones for more than a fraction of a second. For this reason I cannot give it 5 stars, because it is not a universal amplifier, and you have to check if it would be adequate with regard to the impedance and sensitivity of the connected speaker and the listening level.
Is this a common defect?

Amir tested power output of many frequencies, but those are single tones. How about max power with white/pink nose?
 
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